


subsumed, piece by piece

by shirohyasha



Series: in no one's favour [1]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, Yotsuba Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 19:06:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10600281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirohyasha/pseuds/shirohyasha
Summary: Yagami’s son is still pretty. He is pretty even on camera when he thinks he is alone, where most people would allow themselves to relax, allow themselves to slip. Light is still pretty.





	

**Author's Note:**

> am i seriously writing death note fanfiction in the year of our lord two thousand and seventeen

Yagami’s son is pretty.

L notes this distantly, absently. He notes it the first time he sees the file – one of the people Raye Pember was investigating, one suspicious face among enough suspicious faces that he’s totally unremarkable – and discards the thought. Yagami Light has a forgone ending. Either he is not Kira, and L will never speak to him, or he is Kira, and L will have him executed. His being pretty is not even close to being important enough to register as a fact.

L drops his file and moves on to the next one. Yagami Sayu is not as pretty as her brother.

 

The surveillance he has on the Yagami household is a clear, horrendous, violation of their human rights. L knows this. He does not care. If he is to catch Kira it needs to be done.

Yagami’s son is still pretty. He is pretty even on camera when he thinks he is alone, where most people would allow themselves to relax, allow themselves to slip. Light is still pretty.

Still pretty and still suspicious. He tells Yagami that there is a five percent chance that Light is Kira. He is lying. Yagami can’t tell.

He crouches in front of the glaring monitors and watches as Light reads his dirty magazines. Yagami had excused himself from watching this again, and L had let him go. He doesn’t understand, not really, why Yagami is so horrified at the thought of his son reading such things. Light is too perfect already – surely, he can be permitted a single vice.

On the monitor, Light continues to read. He doesn’t jerk off. He never has, not while looking at the pictures of girls and not any time L has watched him.

Actually, L does have a problem with Light owning dirty magazines. His problem is that Light is entirely uninterested in women. As far as L can tell, he hates them. While it isn’t that unusual for a man to hate women and still be able to objectify them, Light’s hatred for women is as much about distaste as it is a belief in an incompetence specific to women. He hates them and he doesn’t like them either. L is inclined to believe that the gravure is an excuse for the paper in his door, rather than something Light is actually interested in.

Light stuffs his magazines into a box and puts them on the lowest bookshelf, spines hidden against the walls. He sits at his desk and starts to study.

L watches.

 

Light is perfect. He is textbook. A studious teenager, a helpful older brother, a devoted son. He studies in his room. He goes on dates with girls. He hides magazines with pictures of scantily clad women in. He watches his sister watch terrible soaps with an amused fondness. He is polite to his mother and respects his father.

Perfect. It is as though L had written out a list of things he might expect a normal teenager to do, and Light is the actor hired out to demonstrate them. He is uncannily normal, unnaturally so. It is enough to convince Yagami that his son is innocent. It might be enough to convince anyone else in the world. It is not quite enough for L.

 

The test for To-oh University is embarrassingly easy. L considers for a moment dropping a mark or two, just because he can. He doesn’t, because he’s that petty.

Light had seen him. Light had seen him looking at the back of his head and turned around to make eye contact. Even that had been weirdly normal. Light had turned around to look at him, politely confused, and had then turned back to the paper in front of him and proceeded to focus himself entirely on that.

L plans on getting Light’s attention with this. That’s the whole point of taking this farcical test. He’ll have to be made student representative in order to do so, so dropping marks would be counterproductive. Anything less than that would cause someone like Light to assess him and dismiss him – the world’s greatest detective should be at least able to get the top score in an entrance test.

L is a little concerned about how much energy he is focusing on Light. Light is his primary suspect. Light is his only suspect. No one else has even come close to being as suspect as Light. But staring at the back of his pale neck while he is curved over a test does not feel like clinical curiosity to L.

 

It is not clinical curiosity.

L does not care for most human traits. He has little interest in sex. He does not care for people. But Light is more impressive than most.

_I am L_

he says, and Light’s eyes widen in surprise. Of course they do. Anyone’s would. That’s normal. That’s not nearly enough to profile Light as Kira.

 _If you are who you say you are,_ Light says, _then I admire and respect you_.

Is that an odd thing to say? L thinks it might be. But he doesn’t know anyone else Light’s age and he has no interest in talking to anyone, so he’s just going to have to assume that Light’s behaviour is normal enough that no one else has ever viewed him as suspicious.

 

There is no one else.

L has looked at everything. He has examined every crime scene, every suspect, every possible clue. Case files, evidence. It has all blurred together in him, the tiny impossible details building up into a picture made up of individual pixels. Only the picture doesn’t make sense. He can’t tell what he’s looking at. He can’t tell who he’s looking at.

Kira is male. Japanese. A student, most likely. Was being investigated by Raye Pember before he died, but not so soon before he died it was suspicious.

Light played tennis in middle school. Light was good at tennis in middle school.

Coincidentally, so was L.

Trying to assuage the likelihood of Light being Kira using a tennis game would be pointless – Kira hates losing but then so do most people, and Light is more arrogant than most. There is no reason for him not to be. He is a genius, athletic, charming and studious and beautiful and L wants to pin him to the chain-link fence and lick the sweat off his throat.

He loses the game. Light takes him to a coffee shop, one that L had already known he frequented.

Just flawed enough. Just flawed enough to be above suspicion. Just flawed enough to be far enough above suspicion that it’s suspicious. L almost wishes Light weren’t Kira, because then he might be able to have a conversation with him.

 

The longer L goes without dragging any more suspects out of the woodwork, the more convinced he becomes that Kira is the beautiful teenager who is ostensibly a classmate at the university he doesn’t quite attend. All of his evidence against Light is circumstantial but if Light is not Kira then someone else is, and Kira is not quite good enough to leave no clues at all.

But Light is perfect. Light is unimaginably perfect.

Light is perfect and Light is eighteen and Light is a serial killer of a magnitude that this world has never seen before. Light is seven years younger than L.

Light has a dumb blonde girlfriend. L recognises her after a moment – he’s only human, and she is famous – and plucks her phone from her pocket when he gets the chance. He wonders if Light has fucked her yet. He wonders what Light looks like during sex. He’s probably pushy. Pushy and bossy and controlling, and Amane Misa would almost definitely bend over backwards when he acted like that.

L thinks he might prefer to watch Light bend over backwards. He thinks Light might prefer it that way too, though he’s not certain yet.

 

Arresting Amane is easy. It’s also easy to deprive her of almost all basic rights, to deny her sight and movement and stimulation. People don’t ask too much. People don’t question L.

Light is even easier. He volunteers. L gets to put the cuffs on

(and _oh_ , L may be the world’s foremost at putting away bad people, but he never claimed to be _good_ )

but he watches Light’s ankles be bound on a monitor several floors away.

Most of his energy is focused on trying to decode Light’s behaviour, on trying to understand why the hell he’s decided that his time is best served chained up on the floor of a prison cell. He wants to be proven innocent. Rather, he wants L to believe he’s innocent. Kira wold not do something so obvious as to let the killings stop as soon as he was thrown in a cell. Kira would have a plan, a scheme, something terrible and devious and brilliant that would flummox them all for the months it lasted and shock them as he revealed it in the seconds before it killed them.

L would, if he were so inclined, describe himself as flummoxed. Light’s actions don’t make any sense. There is no way that Light is innocent of everything, but the thought that he is being manipulated does not sit right with L. It is not quite within the realms of possibility. Even curled up and bound on the floor, Light seems to be in control. Balanced.

But not quite the same man he was when he went in.

Not quite.

The tiny, tiny sliver of his brain that is devoted to reptilian functions does not care about Kira. It cares about Light’s hands bound behind his back and his collarbones, pale and delicate in the fluorescent lights of the cell. They watch him shower. They watch him eat. They watch him sleep. It isn’t the first time L has seen any of this, but this time Light is so much more vulnerable to him. This time Light came and stretched his hands out for the cuffs, and walked into a cell with his eyes wide open, knowing that L would be watching.

Even if Light were innocent – and with every passing day, L doubts that more – he is still brilliant. There is no way he couldn’t have known how L looks at him. L cannot possibly be the first man to look at Light as he does. Just because it is not _done_ doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Though Light, being as perfect as he is, has likely done no more than acknowledge the fact that sometimes men will look at him in a way that is not so different to how other men look at pretty women.

 

Light spends another month in confinement. If L had his way, Light would never leave, but L is being held to account by Yagami and the rest of the taskforce, and they’ve all convinced themselves that the boy they have in their cell is beyond reproach.

He has Yagami put on a show for Light and Misa, has him point a gun loaded with blanks at the two of them and fire at his son, and when they all survive L has to concede to the other members. He should never have recruited them. He’s not sure they’ve been worth the trouble.

And then he has Light chained to him. It almost frustrates him how easy it is. Light doesn’t protest. Yagami barely does. The rest of the task force accept his words as law and find handcuffs. He almost wants to scream.

 _I could be taking advantage_ he thinks. _I could be some deviant pervert taking advantage of someone as beautiful as Light, and if you all think he’s innocent you should be trying harder to protect him._

The thought is one of many, one of thousands of viewpoints cultivated to give him as broad an insight into every train of thought conceivable for every kind of human. Other thoughts are _these cuffs will let me less than five metres from him_ and _he’ll still be able to do things without my noticing_ and _we’re both going to be constrained here until I decide this is over, unable to leave this tower_ and _Misa is going to be furious_ and thousands and thousands and thousands of other thoughts that allow for as many possible situations as his mortal brain can manage.

It’s funny, for a while, dragging Light around on the chain. Light argues back, sometimes, flickers of irritation in his eyes. Mostly they stay sat, hunched in their chairs, staring at the screens. Light is good at detective work; Light may grow to be better at L at detective work, or at least he could have done, if he had not cut off that path when he had started something that had put L on his trail.

 

They have separate beds, though L had joked it would have been easier for them to share. There are enough rooms in their tower that it would be easy. Misa had screamed at him for that. Changing shirts is complicated. Showering is awkward and so is using the toilet. It takes weeks for them to be able to move around relatively unhindered, though L does make that more difficult deliberately. Why shouldn’t he? He’s trapped too, trapped with Kira.

Misa thinks he’s disgusting. Misa would be right. The rest of the task force dismiss her as jealous and paranoid but she turns her heavily made-up eyes on him and scowls thinly. It’s evolved into one of her less melodramatic expressions, like she knows what he’s thinking and also knows she won’t win this battle.

 _If you touch him,_ she hisses, and L smiles his creepy empty smile. _If you touch him I will know._

Misa can’t have sex with Light. Rather, she won’t, not with L in the room. Fair enough. L now knows that they haven’t fucked yet, because Misa had screeched at him for taking that opportunity away from her.

 _You don’t want to sleep with her, do you?_ L asks him when they’re alone. Their room is the only one in the tower without cameras, without wires. Light shakes his head.

_I told you. I won’t play with her feelings._

_A shame,_ L thinks. _You used to be crueller._

He doesn’t say it. He watches as Light fumbles with the cuffs trying to change his shirt. The cuffs are, honestly, mostly redundant. If he wanted Light under 24 hour surveillance, by his side at all times, Light would be there. He’s that desperate to prove his innocence. He wouldn’t be able to sneak out – he could have Watari lock them in the same room while L sleeps. The cuffs are vindictive. The cuffs are cruel.

Light doesn’t look at L while he’s shirtless. He glances up when he’s done, but doesn’t meet L’s eyes.

 _You don’t like girls at all_ L tells him, and pulls his own shirt off. Light doesn’t answer. _I don’t have a preference._

He’s not quite lying. He doesn’t pay attention to sex most of the time. But Kira is horrifying enough that L is excited.

 _Is that so,_ Light says. It’s not a question. He doesn’t sound surprised.

Light is perfect. Light is perfect enough that it’s likely he’s never so much as allowed himself to entertain the notion of sleeping with another man. Light has never not been perfect – they’ve been chained together for weeks now, and L has yet to see him undignified or abashed.

 _You think I’m Kira_ Light says. L smiles, and drops his shirt to the floor. _You still want to sleep with me._

L doesn’t see how they’re related. Light connects the most unrelated of statements. He’s a little too much like most people in that respect.

_I’ll wager you’d rather sleep with me than Amane Misa._

L goes to bed.

 

He does not know what it is to be where Light is. He has never had disapproving relatives whisper rudely about people like him and he has never had any expectations placed on him as a person. He has never cared that he finds men at least as attractive as women. It has never mattered that he gets married and has children. Light has never had that freedom. Light has never had much freedom.

He does have significantly more freedom than his sister ever will. Or he did, until L wrapped cold metal around his wrist and confined him to a tower like some kind of fairytale princess.

Like some kind of beast. It is hard to forget who he has on the other end of his tether.

He does fuck Light. He wraps the chain between them around his wrists and pins him to the mattress of a bed, and fucks him until it must hurt. For once, Light is imperfect, teeth gritted in pain, eyes unfocused, skin red. It is filthy. It is debauched. It is cruel.

Light doesn’t complain. Afterwards he does, complains about the raw angry marks on his wrists where the metal links rubbed, about how he’s not supposed to bend like that, about L disturbing what little sleep they get. But he lets him do it again.

 

There are leads. They are mostly dead, coming up with nothing but dust and air. Light compiles lists of people, names dates and times and causes and lifestyle choices and crimes and friends all reduced to blocks of pixels on Light’s monitors.

 _The Yotsuba group_ he mumbles one day. _I’m going to look into them_.

L ignores him and eats his strawberries. He’s following his own leads. Light is Kira, the first Kira. Amane Misa is the second. Whoever is killing now is someone else, someone who is very nearly a perfect copy but not quite. There are flaws. L wonders if that was planned by Light.

Perhaps if they had a single clue as to how Kira killed, it could at least let him know what to look for when compiling evidence. There are several drugs that can induce heart attacks, none of which have been found in any of the victims. There had been no puncture marks in the bodies, nothing in their bloodstreams, nothing ingested which could have done it.

As it was, all he had to go on was the fact that Yagami Light was too perfect, and too convenient.

Light has something, a tangible lead that they can follow. Something to investigate, something that will end up with whoever is committing murders in Kira’s name now in jail, awaiting execution. Light is very, very good at this.

 

Matsuba is not. Matsuba gets himself caught by the group and they have to feign his death to get him out alive. It’s almost worth the trouble when he confirms that they’re in league with Kira, but mostly it’s irritating, and nothing they couldn’t have figured out from the safety of their tower.

It is easy enough to trick Light into encouraging Amane into helping. Amane is simple, easy to flatter and easier still to manipulate. She calls him her friend, and then clings to Light’s arm and beams at them both. Light was on his knees where the two of them are standing now not twelve hours ago.

L is frankly amazed that a girl as stupid as Amane was able to become the second Kira. What’s more amazing is that he hasn’t got any proof of it yet. Perhaps that can be attributed to Light, or perhaps her vapid persona is just that – a shell, hiding genius eclipsing both his and Light’s.

L doubts that.

They send Amane. Light protests but it is weak, feeble, pathetic. If he truly opposed this, he would have been able to twist Amane into thinking this was too dangerous for her. He knows what must be done to catch Kira, and he’s putting up no more than a token protest.

 _Are you afraid for her,_ L asks him later. Light glares up at him, hair in his eyes, ugly red in his cheeks. Making Light think of Misa during sex is pleasurable in its own way, though it has very little to do with anything carnal. Since getting used to her mass-produced prettiness, L finds her about as interesting as Light does.

Poor girl.

Light starts to answer but L isn’t interested, and covers his mouth with a hand. There is a muffled sound of protest but the chain is tangled around them both and Light can’t push him off without hurting himself, so he doesn’t.

 

Light uses his alias to talk to Namikkawe. It’s strangely intimate. L wishes he could get used to it. Light is as clever as he is. He’s the first person who’s been able to follow his lines of thought as they’re developing. He’s the first person who’s been able to jump ahead of L, to take the half-ideas given to him and extrapolate until there’s something to work with.

Light is good at pretending to be him. If Kira kills him, it is likely Light who will take over as L.

If Kira kills him, he won’t be around to care that he was beaten. And if he catches Kira, the world wins. There is no way for L to win.

 

There is a plan. A wild, dangerous, possibly lethal plan. Matsuda knows he could die. So does everyone in the Sakura TV building. But Higuchi is dangerous and can kill with just a face now, and they have no choice but to stop him.

He’s been cornered. It’s not a question of if they’ll catch Higuchi, it’s a question of how many he’ll kill before they do. L shoves Light into the side of the helicopter and kisses him violently, and Light shoves him off and climbs in.

 

_Death Gods_

Nothing else could possibly befit this case. Nothing else makes sense, even though the very notion that there are otherworldly beings controlling their lives sets L’s teeth on edge. Monsters they can’t see, monsters that can kill them with a few strokes of a pen.

Monsters like the boy sitting next to him.

L looks at his hands. They are empty. He turns to look at Light.

The notebook is a small thing, thin and nondescript. It is the sort of thing a college student such as the one Light had been before L ruined his life might own.

Light is screaming.

It is an odd thing, the creature down by Higuchi. But it does not warrant this amount of screaming from Light. L stares at him, frozen in horror.

He has lost.

As has been the theme of this case, L has no evidence for his theories, and it is likely only Watari will believe him now. But he is unshakably certain that this was the final design of Light’s plan, that all of the pieces fell exactly where he told them to, and that Kira’s victory is total and complete.

And he has lost.

Higuchi dies. L is not surprised. Light had been scribbling a moment before, making notes about the book, and then Higuchi had collapsed dead.

Total victory for Light. Total victory for Kira.

L grits his teeth and starts planning.

 

He fucks Light that night, pretending he’s high off of adrenaline and victory. Light does too, and he’s better at pretending. _We did it,_ he says. _We got Kira, we won._

L doesn’t answer, digs his nails into Light’s sides, watches him squirm. Light looks a little irritated and L does it again, harder this time.

Before, Light hadn’t looked irritated when L hurt him. He’d enjoyed it and he’d been ashamed of that. L hadn’t cared. But now Light looks annoyed. His mask is still almost perfect but it’s far more difficult to keep a perfect façade up when you’re on your back with your legs wrapped around someone’s waist.

And he’s annoyed that L is getting off on hurting him. On humiliating him. He’s annoyed that because he’d done it _before,_ he has to do it now, so L doesn’t realise anything has changed. Only L has realised, and his efforts are futile. He’d been cruel to Light when he’d thought he was being cruel to Kira.

Well, he’s got Kira now.

He covers Light’s eyes and moves, and Light grunts. It’s an ugly sound. This is the only time Light is ugly, and it’s because of L.

 

There’s not a lot of time left. He’s no longer chained to Light and so they can both move freely now, and L has no doubts that his days on this earth are numbered. If the last thing he can do is prove Kira’s identity, so be it.

If that’s not the _last_ thing he does, so much better. If he gets to live on past this and take other cases, he’ll be glad. But this will be the biggest thing he ever does. Nothing else could possibly compare.

The death god is creepy. His questions are not given real answers, and the creature seems determined to hinder his progress without actively sabotaging him. No one else on the team fares any better.

He records his progress, to be sent to his successors, should he die. He orders Watari that everything is to be destroyed, should he die.

All that is left to do is pore over the death note. The rules are absurd, ritualistic and ancient. They are ornate and impractical and maybe, just maybe, one of them is fake.

It’s an obvious enough step to try and test the note. The others protest as he knew they would but there’s no other options. They have to know how this thing works. It is the only thing even close to resembling a lead that they have and Kira is killing again, and if they do not find him soon the world will bow to him.

So he announces they will test it and will not listen to any arguments.

He wanders out into the rain.

 

L digs his thumb into Light’s foot and makes no effort to hide the fact he enjoys it’s hurting him. He never has attempted to hide that he enjoys hurting Light.

 _It is a shame that soon we will part_ he says. Light catches the side of his face with the towel, rubbing at the water still dripping down his face. They’d never fucked while wet. L is inclined to wish they had, at least once.

There is no reason for Kira to be cupping his face this gently. Light looks uncertain for a moment, before dropping his hand.

Light is beautiful and terrible, and L feels like a gargoyle carved at the foot of a statue of some ancient and wrathful god. He digs his thumb in again and Light hisses, and the illusion is broken and Light is a pretty teenage boy that got his hands on a weapon of mass destruction once more.

An alarm blares, and the screen lights up in front of them, informing them that everything has been deleted.

 _Watari_ L shouts. Watari is dead. The rest of them are screaming. Kira has won then, and they will all be dead within forty seconds. L wonders if there is anything left he can do. He has no doubt that eventually Kira will be exposed, but until he is he will continue climbing to godhood and Light will continue slipping into madness.

L feels his heart stop.

_Defeat._

Light’s smile is ugly.

**Author's Note:**

> creepy sex that follows canon plot. groundbreaking.
> 
> title from shitty horoscopes book ii: anger


End file.
